What do wolves think about dogs? Essential Tips

Study finds signs of attachment in young wolves, though experts are divided

In the late 1970s, archaeologists made a stunning find in northern Israel. In a 12,000-year-old village, where families buried loved ones under their homes, they uncovered the remains of a woman and a young dog, her hand resting on the puppy’s chest.

The find is some of the earliest evidence of the bond between humans and our canine pals, perhaps the most powerful emotional connection between species in the animal kingdom. But even after years of study researchers are divided on how this bond began. Did it arise over thousands of years, as early dogs became tamer and more attuned to human behaviors? Or was this fire already burning in the ancestors of dogs: the gray wolf?

A new study of young wolves suggests they are indeed capable of making doglike attachments to people. Under some circumstances, they might even view humans as a source of comfort and protection.

The findings add support to the idea that wolves may harbor some traits once thought exclusive to dogs, says Monique Udell, a human-animal interaction researcher at Oregon State University, Corvallis, who was not involved with the work. But other experts say the study was not well designed and therefore is not convincing.

The new work utilizes an experiment known as the Strange Situation test. Originally created to study attachment between human infants and their mothers, it measures how the stress of being confronted with an unfamiliar person or setting changes a subject’s behavior when they’re reunited with their caregiver. More interaction implies a tighter bond.

Wolves aren’t born wanting to participate in such experiments, so the team behind the new study had to do some heavy coddling early on. Christina Hansen Wheat, a behavioral ecologist at Stockholm University, and colleagues hand-raised 10 gray wolves from the time they were 10 days old, before they could even open their eyes. The researchers took shifts, spending 24 hours a day with the pups, initially getting up every 2 to 3 hours in the middle of the night to bottle feed them. (“It was like having 10 newborns at once,” Hansen Wheat says.)

When the animals were 23 weeks old, a caregiver led them one at a time into a mostly empty room. Over the course of several minutes, the caregiver exited and entered the room, sometimes leaving the wolf alone, sometimes leaving it with a complete stranger. The team repeated the experiment with 12 23-week-old Alaskan huskies, which they’d raised similarly since puppyhood.

For the most part, the scientists saw few differences between the wolves and the dogs. When their caregiver entered the room, both species scored 4.6 on a five-point scale of “greeting behavior”—a desire to be around the human. When the stranger entered, dog greeting behavior dropped to 4.2 and wolf to 3.5, on average, suggesting both animals made a distinction between the person they knew and the one they didn’t, the team reports today in Ecology and Evolution. It’s this distinction that the team counts as a sign of attachment.

Dogs and wolves were also similar in making more physical contact with their caregivers than strangers during the experiment.

In addition, dogs barely paced–a sign of stress—during the test, whereas wolves paced at least part of the time. That’s not surprising, Udell says, as even hand-raised wolves are more jittery around people. “The wolves are acting like you would expect wolves to act.”

However, the wolves stopped pacing almost entirely when a stranger left the room and their caretaker returned. Hansen Wheat says that’s never been seen before in wolves. It could be a sign, she says, that the animals view the humans who raised them as a “social buffer”–a source of comfort and support.

For Udell, that’s the most interesting part of the study. “If this is true, this sort of attachment is not what separates dogs from wolves,” she says. In other words, it didn’t have to be bred into them by humans, but could have been favored by human selection.

She speculates that the pacing experiment may imply that other wild animals could form strong bonds with humans. Does that hand-raised cheetah at the zoo view its caregiver as just a food dispenser, or a comforter, she wonders. “These relationships may be happening even when we’re not aware of them.”

Not everyone is convinced. Márta Gácsi, an ethologist at Eötvös Loránd University who helped pioneer the Strange Situation test for dogs and wolves in 2005, says the results don’t match what her team has seen. She and colleagues observed stark differences between wolves and dogs, with the wolves making little distinction between their caregiver and a complete stranger. Based on such results, she and others have concluded that the ability to form attachments with specific humans was not present in wolves.

Gácsi contends there are several methodological problems with the new study, including that the experiment room was familiar to the animals (and thus not “strange” enough to them to elicit an attachment response), that all dogs came from the same breed (making it hard to generalize how wolves compare with dogs in general), and that the wolves didn’t pace enough to say anything about what this behavior means. “I’m afraid no valid conclusions can be drawn” about the study, she says.

Hansen Wheat says she’s not arguing that dogs and wolves are the same. “We’re still talking about wild animals,” she says. “What we saw does not make them dogs.”

But she argues that even picking up hints of bonding behavior in wolves suggests they already had this trait in the early days of dog evolution. “That could have been the seed we selected for,” and then strengthened over the eons, she says. (Something similar may have happened with dogs’ ability to fetch.)

Hansen Wheat says the key to understanding what happened during dog domestication is to pay attention to what they have in common. “I often get asked how wolves and dogs differ—but the real question we should ask is, ‘How are they similar?’” she says. “That’s the key to figuring out how we created the dog.”

David Grimm is the Online News Editor of Science.

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Breeding for dependence, not cooperation, may have driven initial dog domestication

For dog lovers, comparative psychologists Friederike Range and Zsófia Virányi have an unsettling conclusion. Many researchers think that as humans domesticated wolves, they selected for a cooperative nature, resulting in animals keen to pitch in on tasks with humans. But when the two scientists at the Messerli Research Institute at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna studied lab-raised dog and wolf packs, they found that wolves were the tolerant, cooperative ones. The dogs, in contrast, formed strict, linear dominance hierarchies that demand obedience from subordinates, Range explained last week at the Animal Behavior Society meeting at Princeton University. As wolves became dogs, she thinks, they were bred for the ability to follow orders and to be dependent on human masters.

Range and Virányi developed their new portrayal of dogs and wolves by giving a series of tests to socialized packs of mixed-breed dogs and wolves, four packs of each species, containing anywhere from two to six animals each. The scientists raised all the animals from about 10 days old at the Wolf Science Center in Game Park Ernstbrunn, Austria, living with them 24 hours a day until they were introduced to pack life, so that they were accustomed to humans.

Range and her colleagues tested the dogs and wolves tolerance for their fellow pack members with a mealtime challenge. The researchers paired a high-ranking dog with a low-ranking pack buddy and set out a bowl of food, then gave the same challenge to a pair of wolves. In every matchup, “the higher ranking dog monopolized the food,” Range told the meeting. “But in the wolf tests, both high- and low-ranking animals had access” and were able to chow down at the same time. At times, the more dominant wolves were “mildly aggressive toward their subordinates, but a lower ranking dog wont even try” when paired with a top dog, Range said. “They dont dare to challenge.”

Wolves also beat the hounds on tests that assessed whether the canids were able to follow the gaze of their fellows to find food. “They are very cooperative with each other, and when they have a disagreement or must make a group decision, they have a lot of communication or talk first,” Range said. The same was not true for the centers dog packs; for even the smallest transgression, a higher ranked dog “may react aggressively” toward one that is subordinate.

Range and Virányi suspect that the relationship between dogs and humans is hierarchical, with humans as top dogs, rather than cooperative, as in wolf packs. The notion of “dog-human cooperation” needs to be reconsidered, Range said, as well as “the hypotheses that domestication enhanced dogs cooperative abilities.” Instead, our ancestors bred dogs for obedience and dependency. “Its not about having a common goal,” Range said. “Its about being with us, but without conflict. We tell them something, and they obey.”

“Its wonderful work,” says James Serpell, an ethologist at the University of Pennsylvania. “But its not what the dog training community wants to hear; you cant say the word dominance around them. Does dominance exist as a phenomenon in dogs? The answer is clearly yes, ” Serpell says, although he notes that there are breed differences. Other researchers, for example, have shown that when in packs, poodles and Labrador retrievers are more aggressive than are malamutes and German shepherds.

Monique Udell, an animal behaviorist at Oregon State University, Corvallis, says her own study of dog and wolf behavior, also presented at the meeting, supports Ranges contention that dogs are waiting for orders. To find out if dogs are “independent problem solvers,” she presented 20 adult dogs (10 pets and 10 from shelters) with sealed containers of summer sausage. Each animal was allotted 2 minutes to open it. Ten captive wolves were given the same test. Not one of the adult dogs succeeded; most did not even try. Meanwhile, eight of the 10 wolves opened the container in less than 2 minutes. So did dog puppies, indicating that dogs are no less capable of the task than wolves, but “as the dog grows and becomes more dependent on its human owner that [independent] behavior is inhibited,” Udell said.

Underscoring the point, she found that adult pooches could open the container after all—when their human owner told them to do so. Because dogs “suppress their independence, its difficult to know what their normal problem-solving abilities are,” she told the meeting.

It may be that we have to give Fido a command to find out.

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“This result is exciting, not because wolves are more social than we thought, but because it is a step in uncovering the complexities of the differences between dogs and wolves in how they interact with humans,” said evolutionary biologist Kathyrn Lord, a postdoctoral associate in the Karlsson lab at the University of Massachusetts Medical School (who wasn’t involved in the study), in an email to Gizmodo. “Initially, it was supposed that wolves did not form social attachments with humans and dogs did, then it came out that we needed to look more closely at what was meant by attachment and we found that at least wolf pups did seem to have attachments with the people who socialized them. This paper supports those earlier findings that wolf pups do seem to form attachments and that while they are not dependent upon their caretakers later in life a social bond does seem to persist into adulthood.”

Hekman says the new study nicely mirrors her own field observations, showing that wolves respond differently to their caregivers than to other people. This finding is important, she says, because scientists are still trying to pick apart what the actual differences are between dog and wolf behavior. “Dogs bond tightly with humans, and as it turns out, wolves are capable of that too.”Advertisement

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To reach these conclusions, Ujfalussy’s team conducted experiments using wolf puppies raised by humans. (The experiments were conducted back in the early 2000s, but, due to the authors’ personal circumstances, the results are just being published now.) These wolves came from the Family Dog Project, an initiative founded in 1994 by József Topál and his colleagues to study the behavioral and cognitive aspects of the dog-human relationship. Over the years, this project has yielded over 100 publications in peer-reviewed journals. But for the purposes of this study, participants with the Family Dog Project were asked to raise wolf puppies—and in a way that was identical to how they would normally hand raise dogs (e.g. daily walks on leashes, cuddling, grooming, etc.). The wolf pups used in this study were socialized intensively to humans, making them ideal subjects for experiments to reveal any ‘inborn’ differences.Advertisement

Previous work had suggested that human-raised wolves, by the age of 16 weeks, don’t show any attachment to their caretakers as dogs do. This implied that only dogs are able to form a strong personal relationship to humans.Advertisement

WHY DO WOLVES KILL DOGS? Wolf Vs Dog

Wolves and dogs are separated by 15,000 years of evolution, during which time the species have veered off into radically different directions. Dogs still retain many of their ancestral behaviors, but less is known about any latent “dog-like” tendencies among modern wolves. A new study of human-raised wolf pups suggests wolves can become attached to their owners in a manner reminiscent of dogs—but that’s where the similarities end.Watch

New research published today in Royal Society Open Science shows that wolf puppies, when raised by humans, display signs of both attachment and affection towards their owners, and that these feelings last into adulthood. The study also shows that extensively socialized wolves are relatively comfortable around human strangers, though they sometimes exhibit a bit of fear. These findings hint at behaviors that may have led their four-legged ancestors to seek out and find comfort among humans, leading to the emergence of those super-cuddly, face-licking furballs known as dogs.

Before we get ahead of ourselves, it’s important to remember that wolves—even those raised by humans—are not dogs. Not by a long shot. This new study, which was led by Dorottya Ujfalussy from Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary, tells us something new about wolf behavior, specifically, that wolves can become attached to their human caregivers. It’s a finding that may prove significant when considering animal welfare and human safety issues faced by zoos and conservation areas. But what this study does not tell us is that humans should start raising wolf puppies. Wolves are still wild animals, and human environments are far removed from their natural habitats.Advertisement

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Indeed, wolves and dogs are two very distinct species. They may look similar (at least some dog breeds still look a bit wolf-like), but they exhibit profoundly different behaviors. Dogs have developed an intense and natural affinity towards humans, with brain scans suggesting they’re happier around us than they are around members of their own species. When stressed, dogs find comfort in the presence of humans—a trait that’s been reinforced through domestication. Wolves, on the other hand, are naturally wary of humans, fearing our presence and our environments. And unlike dogs, they’re fiercely independent. Wolf pups, for instance, are often left alone when the pack goes out to hunt, giving these animals an almost cat-like self-sufficiency. Unlike dogs, wolves have never had to lean on another species for support.

But scientists have also documented some behavioral similarities between dogs and wolves. When greeting each other, for instance, wolves like to lick each others’ faces—a trait that’s all too familiar to dog owners. Wolves are also capable of following a person’s gaze into space, and they understand gestures like finger pointing (not even chimps can do this). Advertisement

Given these similarities, Ujfalussy sought to learn more about the kinds of relationship that wolves, when socialized to humans, can have with their human caretakers. A primary aim of the study was to figure out what makes dogs so unique in their relationship with humans, and where their traits may have originated. Ultimately, Ujfalussy was trying to learn if dog behaviors were already present in ancestral wolves, or if they’re a product of domestication and artificial selection. This new research suggests the former may be true.

“We thought even at that time that the case is not that simple and wanted to describe the wolf-human relationship in more detail,” Ujfalussy explained to Gizmodo. “What we learned from our study is that while dogs may be more attached to their human caretaker in the sense of dependence and using their owners as a secure base, wolves are also able to form lasting affiliative relationships with their caretakers, though without a sense of dependence.”

In the two experiments conducted, wolf puppies were put through a greeting test in which they were exposed to four visitor types: their immediate caregivers (or “foster-parents” as they’re called), close acquaintances, people they’ve met only once before, and complete strangers. In the first experiment, eight wolves were exposed to visitors when in the company of other wolves, but for the second experiment, nine wolf puppies had to go it alone.Advertisement

“In our first experiment we opted for a group condition as we intended to keep the visits as stress free as possible for our subjects,” said Ujfalussy. “The presence of their pack mates gives social support. This was important especially in cases of stranger visits. However, in this situation the behaviour of [individual wolf pups were] not independent from the others, thus [making the] behaviour harder to interpret. For this reason we designed the second, individual experiment, at a later age, when wolves were more confident.”

In the first experiment, the wolf pups were six months old, and in the second experiment they were tested at 12 months and 24 months. To keep the interactions as consistent as possible, visitors were told to wear the same clothing, not wear any perfume or cologne, and not have anything in their pocket, along with a host of other control measures. Advertisement

In both tests, the wolves approached visitors of all types readily and willingly. The six-month-old pups flocked to their human caregivers in an “intense and friendly” manner, and they were comfortable in the company of all visitor types. The 12-month-old and 24-month-old wolves likewise approached their foster-parents and close acquaintances with affection, but they were a bit apprehensive when approaching the other two visitor types. No aggressive behaviors were documented, but some of the wolf pups exhibited crouching and tail-tucking behaviors when approaching the strangers, which suggests they were a bit scared. Still, given that some of the wolves were as old as 24 months during the experiments, the results suggest that human-raised wolves will continue to seek contact with humans into early adulthood.

“To our knowledge, this study was the first to examine the relationship of intensively socialized hand reared wolves with humans varying in familiarity in a Greeting Situation Test,” says Ujfalussy.Advertisement

Still, it’s important that we greet these results with caution—it’s difficult to discern behavior from constrained experiments like these. The researchers did their best to minimize confounding factors, but that’s next to impossible; smells, body language, and other variables can interfere with results.Advertisement

The precise origin of our canine companions is mired in controversy. But a new study suggests that…

Also, there are limitations to studying wolves as precursors to dog behavior. Dogs are not descended from wolves (at least not modern wolves); both wolves and dogs split from a common ancestor around 15,000 years ago—an ancient animal whose behavior we’re not able to study. Advertisement

Finally, the sample sizes weren’t great; a total of ten wolf pups were used in the study.

“Yes, indeed, our sample sizes are not huge,” Ujfalussy admitted to Gizmodo. “This is obviously because in Hungary (thankfully) wolves are relatively rarely born in captivity. Also, hand-rearing and individual socialization is a hard and trying job. And…these animals have to be taken care of for the rest of their lives, which is a challenge and a responsibility at the same time. For these reasons, we worked with the lowest possible sample size—data from which it’s still sufficient for statistical analysis.”Advertisement

Jessica Hekman, a PhD Candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a veterinarian doing research in the genetics of dog behavior, isn’t surprised by these findings, and says this research jibes well with her own personal experience with wolves.Advertisement

“I’ve been lucky to be able to spend time at Wolf Park, Indiana, where I saw wolves greeting familiar people,” Hekman, who wasn’t involved in the new study, told Gizmodo. “I saw one wolf greeting the man who had raised her, whom she hadn’t seen in months (a year, maybe). She was ecstatic to see him. I also saw wolves greeting their favorite human, who they saw probably about once a day or a little less at best guess, again clearly greeting him differently from others. I got to interact with them myself as a stranger, and they treated me very differently, much cooler.”

One of the the more interesting findings, says Hekman, is that wolves do greet strangers, but still show fear-related behaviors. Advertisement

“This study doesn’t compare these behaviors to how dogs greet strangers,” says Hekman. “My guess would be that there’s variation between individual dogs and individual wolves, but overall, that dogs show less fear of strangers than wolves do. The reduction of fear is thought to be a critical part of domestication.”

Obviously, this doesn’t mean we should brazenly approach wolves in the wild. Still, Ujfalussy says we have no reason to be wary or afraid of wild wolves, particularly if they’re given sufficient habitats, where they can live a natural life. Wild wolves under natural conditions avoid contact with humans, she says, and they have a good reason to do so.Advertisement

“The problem starts when people disregard the advice of professionals and mistake wolves for dogs, keeping them as pets,” she says. “This is a serious welfare issue for wolves, as 99 percent of those animals will eventually be given up and usually euthanized. Basically, wolves are wild animals, more independent, hard to control, hard to manage, and health-keeping conditions are impossible to provide in the human home, thus tame wolves kept as pets are a real danger to their environment and to themselves.”